1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an interactive streaming media production tool.
2. Related Art
The art of producing mixed media scenes has progressed to where individuals are able to create their scene compositions at a workstation, using appropriate software. These mixed media scenes are called “mixed media content”; the associated software is called an “authoring tool”; and the persons creating the video content are called “content creators”. After creation, mixed media content can be disposed at a server and sent, using any streaming or broadcast technique, to a client for presentation to a user.
One problem in the known art is that content creators are very concerned by the quality versus resource occupation tradeoff their mixed media content imposes (on the server, the client, and the communication link between them) when sent from the server to the client and presented to the user. In existing audiovisual systems, fixed resource usage schemes are the most common way to solve this problem, but this is obviously non-optimal. More sophisticated policies include algorithms to balance between peaks and lows so that a level of non-constant resource usage can be tolerated (for instance for bandwidth or memory usage), as this can increase quality quite significantly. However, these resource control mechanisms are not available to the content creator directly, but to skilled engineers who are able to tune these complex algorithms. Mixed media content adds to the flexibility as it is possible to adjust the resource usage by modifying the advent or coding scheme of some media in the broadcast in order to fulfill the given constraints. If the content requires more resources for transmission or decoding than available, presentation of that content can be degraded or inaccurate, and exhibit jerkiness or other artifacts that make it unpleasant to watch and degrade any intended message or effect of that video content.
Moreover, creation of mixed media content is often complex, involving integration of objects to be displayed, locations and times at which those objects are to be displayed, and a set of possible special effects, such as texture and transparency, fade in and out, and the like. It would be advantageous to allow content creators to interactively (as they are creating video content) use information about the resource load likely to be imposed by the content they are creating. Preferably, that resource load information would be responsive not only to the mixed media content itself, but also to characteristics of the server, the client, and the communication link between them.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide a new technique for interactive streaming mixed media production.